All posts by: Jenny O'Grady

The Hrabowski Fund for Innovation – established in honor of UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, to help UMBC faculty pursue new approaches to teaching – made its inaugural awards in January. Among the recipients were Marie desJardins, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering, Nagaraj Neerchal, chair of the department of mathematics and statistics, and Leslie Morgan, a professor of sociology and anthropology.

Each project pushed UMBC’s already burgeoning culture of curricular innovation and pushed it into new directions and disciplines. DesJardins created the ACTIVE (Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment) center to create a more collaborative environment for computer science students. Neerchal piloted a new “Math Gym” that allows students to exercise and improve specific mathematics skills. Morgan was the co-creator of a new “Wisdom Institute” that will harness the talents of UMBC’s emeritus professors.   

As the deadline for the next round of the awards approaches on Friday, October 11, 2013, UMBC Magazine asked these awardees what inspires them to think creatively about teaching and the university – and how they took that extra step to make their vision happen.

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UMBC Magazine: How did you get the idea for ACTIVE?

DesJardins: In some ways, ACTIVE started with the CNMS Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment (CASTLE).  I knew the CASTLE was a College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences thing, so I didn’t know anybody who was in there. But at some point someone mentioned that I might be able to use it for a class I was teaching.

And so I asked: “Would it be possible to use the center for some labs that I was doing for a class?” And it was available. So we did that for a few sessions. It was really nice to have this collaborative space where students can work online on something together. So I was wondering: Why don’t we have these kinds of labs in computer science? What we have now are the kind of sucky ones in the basement of the engineering building, with rows of big monitors that you can’t see past.   So we started talking about: “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool if we had a resource like this.”

I started asking some of the people involved in CASTLE how they had put it together. And around that time our department got a corporate donation from BAE Systems. It wasn’t enough money to do something like the CASTLE, but it was a start. And then our department chair [Gary Carter, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering] said: “You know, I have a space you might be able to use.” So we started to believe that maybe we could do something like this.

When the Hrabowski Fund was announced, I was talking with Penny Rheingans [ a professor of computer science and electrical engineering] and I said: “We have to propose something.” I didn’t know what to propose but knew we had to propose something. And we settled on trying to do something like the CASTLE. But we knew that the Hrabowski Fund money wouldn’t be enough money to build the room. But we thought: “What if we assume that we have enough money from corporate donations to get the room. What would we do with it?”

And that was when inspiration struck. I knew we would never get enough money to build it if we had to buy 50 computers. And we’d never be able to maintain it if there are 50 computers in there. So we thought – what if we had a room like the CASTLE, but more configurable, and we call it a “laptop lab” and we make the students bring their own laptops? So we needed some resources to figure out just how to do that – and all those threads came together in our proposal.

What makes Math Gym innovative? The university already has programs for remediation for students who have trouble with mathematics.

Neerchal: You said the key word: “remediation.” When students don’t have the skills they are supposed to have we recommend that they take a remedial class. The word “remediation” has a negative tone to it, like “rehab.” In the Math Gym we substitute the negative terms with positive words such as “working out” and “building strength” instead of remediation, “coaches” instead of “helpers” or “assistants”.  Students are not going there to work on a deficiency, but they are “working out” to build strength. It’s a paradigm change. If you want to be good at math, you have to work out.

There are a lot of parallels between sports and athletics.  Like sports, Mathematics is also about skill. Just as you don’t build any muscles watching football, you don’t build any skills by just watching your teacher do mathematics.

So that’s why I called this project a “Math Gym.” Students will think of going there as a positive experience.

The “Wisdom Institute” seems to channel the power that emeritus faculty can provide to a campus in a new and attractive concept and name.

Morgan: I triggered the idea unintentionally. I had been doing a lot of work on aging. My research is on aging and the social dynamics of aging. And when I was named the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences two years ago, I decided to focus on age and ageism as issues in society.

So I put together my talk, and Craig Saper [professor and chair of the Language, Literacy, and Culture program] came to my talk, and we then started an email exchange about the fact that as a maturing institution, UMBC is seeing a lot more retirements – and more retirements on the horizon – and that there is a lot of talent and experience and wisdom that those people have.

You can think of it as a brain drain or a talent drain or a wisdom drain, but there are a people who remain engaged with UMBC in a variety of ways. And the Provost’s Office had put together a list of ways that people can remain engaged. But there is no entity that brings that to people’s attention, or that actively moves forward to invite people who might be interested in staying engaged to do that.

So the idea of the Wisdom Institute is to both create a nexus where we can identify all of the opportunities, and collect all of these people and utilize their wisdom and experiences – including creating a course that would be more about life skills, and that would bring the experience and wisdom of emeritus faculty to bear on finding a path through life for graduate students, perhaps, or even for faculty and staff.

It has broadened a bit from the original proposal to approach this issue in a more holistic way. There are a lot of organizations in the country for retirees, but some of them are purely social. And knowing the faculty and staff at UMBC, people would like something with a little more engagement, where their wisdom and experience can be put to use at a level that they would like.  It’s a way of keeping our heritage and tradition as part of the momentum moving forward.

UMBC has a tradition of curricular innovation. It also has a tradition of getting things done even when there is a scarcity of funding. How does the Hrabowski Award encourage both impulses at the university?

DesJardins: First of all, these innovations are risky. Sometimes they don’t go so well. And they also represent a lot of effort on the part of the people doing them. I also think that there is great variability across time and space and departments and economic cycles about how much support and recognition there is for that effort.

The reason I came to UMBC was to teach students. At the root, that’s what I care about.  So if it has a benefit for students that is my primary motivator and my primary reward. But after a while of draining yourself to do that, if no one else around you is recognizing that value, it can get tiring/ so it makes such a huge difference when you feel like your efforts are valued.

The funding [provided by the Hrabowski award] is nice, but just the fact that there is a program, and a recognition and visibility is important. When there is an appreciation of the effort and the amount of energy that it takes to do those things, it creates a culture where it snowballs. People start thinking: “Oh, he did that and everybody really liked it.” There’s a glow around that activity that makes people feel like it would be worthwhile for them.

It also makes you feel like you’re not working in a vacuum. The award draws attention to the fact that people are doing these things and that you should do it too – and that we value that effort in our culture.

Neerchal: In our department, certain elements that make up the Math Gym were already being done.

A key piece of Math Gym is Quiz Zero. It started about five years ago. Students take a quiz on day zero – on the weekend before the class begins. Quiz Zero is diagnostics and placement all rolled into one.  Some of our faculty members were doing it and we decided to scale it up for all our foundation courses.

We also have faculty who are giving extra help to students outside the classroom. Bonny Tighe [a senior lecturer in the department of mathematics and statistics], for instance, hosts a Friday afternoon extra office hour for her students in CASTLE. They’re basically doing problems. Math Gym combines these two ideas scaled up to all our foundations classes.

DesJardins: But it’s the commitment. We’re trying to get this space for ACTIVE renovated. We don’t have a huge amount of clout, but we can say that this is associated with the Hrabowski Fund and it helps get it done.

Morgan: You can say this is an entity. And we’ve gotten some funding. We are building.

So the awards provide a certain amount of momentum too?

Neerchal: Freeman mentions Math Gym almost every time I see him speak. The Hrabowski award enabled us to pilot the idea for two semesters. Hopefully we will get to continue to help the students beyond the pilot.

Morgan: That’s one of the hallmarks of the innovation culture at UMBC. People of good will can make it happen. And then it does happen.

DesJardins: Yes and when you get one of these awards you actually do have to make it happen!

Morgan: The award keeps a project on the agenda in a way that you feel responsible for. And we all set our goals and it gives us a reason to fit this in amongst all the different priorities.

Neerchal: We are already up and running. We are in the corridors of the math department. Based on the Quiz Zero scores, we targeted about 750 students with low QuizZero scores, and close to 600 showed up for a total of 1800 visits.  One student came 34 times.

DesJardins: How did he do in his classes?

Neerchal: He did very well. In fact, he told me it was a life saver. And he is a non-traditional student.

A key aspect of Math Gym is what I call “closing the communication gap.” Students are sent to Math Gym by their instructors with the prescription: “You need to work out.” They come to Math Gym. We log them. We have an algorithm to determine a personalized workout plan. We keep track of their hours. When they are done, we provide the instructors feedback: “This student just finished the prescribed workout in the Math Gym.” We’re closing that communication loop.

DesJardins: We have three students who are going to be working for us to support ACTIVE. They are undergraduates who are interested in education and learning and teaching and pedagogy. It creates a lot of energy. We just went over to our space. It was a lab and it’s been disused for a few years. We’ve removed all the detritus. It’s a big open room. We’re going to have moveable furniture and moveable chairs and moveable white boards and projector screens. I was over there with one of these students and she was getting excited and that made me excited too.

Neerchal: Changing the language really helps to generate student interest. When we were recruiting student coaches for the Math Gym, we did not call them “tutors” or “helpers.” Words with negative connotation are out. Instead they are called “coaches.”

DesJardins: Language is important.

Neerchal: We made a call through the instructors for 8 positions, and we had 32 applications. So we decided do a group interview. Forty plus students showed up for the event.

Morgan: There is an Association for Retired Faculty and Staff that exists but the connotation of that is so different than a Wisdom Institute. A lot of these things are about the lens we use to frame the problem.

DesJardins: Our name is an acronym. Tim Finin [professor of computer science and electrical engineering] came up with that. He’s a genius with acronyms, with coming up with names for things that capture the feeling you want people to have. All three of these projects have names that crystallize their sense.

Neerchal:  The name Math Gym is self explanatory. Recently I was introduced to an alumnus, who is a major donor to the university, as the creator of the Math Gym. Before I could begin my explanation, he said: “I wish it was there when I was a student here.”

It was inspiring to see Freeman donate his entire award check to start a foundation dedicated to promote innovation in the campus.

DesJardins: He’s taken this energy that was already there but a little dissipated and put a name and a program to it. It makes a big difference.

Morgan: I think it encourages people who have a great idea to not toss that idea away because they say I’m too busy.

– Richard Byrne ’86

Learn more about the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation here.

Teaching students how to write more clearly and powerfully in introductory writing classes is at the heart of the university’s mission. But technology is transforming the task, says James Polchin ’89, political science and English, who teaches writing and founded a website – WritingInPublic.com – that celebrates the contemporary essay. Polchin has taught in the Princeton Writing Program, the New School for Social Research, and is currently on the faculty of the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. 

by James Polchin ’89

It has been nearly 30 years since I walked into a small, green-walled classroom in what is now the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chemistry Building for my first session of English composition. The course included the usual curriculum of academic writing exercises and ended with a large research essay.  For my final essay, I wrote about the 19^th century British painter J.M.W. Turner’s influence on the French Impressionists. Along with my classmates, I created a stack of note cards scribbled with fragments of quotes copied from books and journals, organized the note cards, and then wrote outlines. Some of my peers had those early, boxy versions of personal computers, but I drafted my essay by hand and then typed it out, footnotes carefully measured, on an electric typewriter.  The Internet was still a sci-fi fantasy several years down the road.

Just about the time that I was tackling Turner on my typewriter, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh named David Bartholomae published an influential article entitled “Inventing the University.” It began with some provocative first lines: “Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion…. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that defines the discourse of our community.”

Bartholomae argued that each writing assignment did more than ask students to turn thinking into sentences and paragraphs, but rather it asked students to turn thinking into forms of academic discourse – a term that would later become common usage in my graduate school years in the 1990s, when exposure to Bartholomae’s essay helped shape my training and work as a future instructor of writing.

My own UMBC English Composition class had a focus on “inventing the university,” presenting us with isolated exercises in academic writing. Very few of my classmates wrote much beyond the work assigned to them. For many of us, writing seemed divided into either creative efforts (personal and often private) or class assignments that didn’t venture beyond the professor’s tote bag.

Teaching writing today is much different than in 1985. So what’s changed? Today, my students have access to a vast global archive of facts and figures both common and strange.  They have more evidence for writing an essay than at any other time in history, and certainly more than I did in the bowels of the Albin O. Kuhn library, searching for ideas about J.M.W. Turner.  My more sophisticated first-year students come into the writing class with their own blogs or online sites. Many share writing across borders in ways that I could have never conceived in English Composition.

In our digital world, where writing is increasingly more public than private, more social than solely anchored in classroom assignments or private journals, the teaching of writing, like most things today, is more complex. I am often wondering what are we asking students to invent when we ask them to write at the university today?

Recently I gave my first-year students an essay by cultural historian Neal Gabler entitled “The Elusive Big Idea.” Gabler argues that we are in an age where the concept of the big idea, such as Freud’s unconscious or Betty Friedan’s the “feminine mystique” have become passé. Information is more important than big ideas. “In the past,” Gabler explains, “we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful – into ideas that made sense of the information.”

I was surprised to find many of my students agreed with Gabler, and even believe that we have found all the great ideas already. “We are simply building on the big ideas from the past,” one student claimed. This claim is the echo of the information culture, where facts and sound bites and fragments of knowledge stand for knowledge itself.  It is a bit like having all those note cards with quotes and comments and ideas but not actually turning them into the essay.

If English Composition taught us the rigors of academic research, today’s writing classes have to engage with the very fragmented process of writing and thinking, a vast network of facts and figures and frauds. If big ideas are difficult to find today, the work of reflecting on evidence and ideas is even harder to grasp. Reflection requires a distance, a stepping back from all the information, getting out of the net.

For years I have been trying to recover the essay from mere assignment, or a tool used only to invent the university. I have wished to give it a more active and engaged place.  For my students, conversation, rather than pure self-contained argument, is crucial and necessary to the kind of writing they need to invent.  While many of us may have been taught how to form arguments, our students today need to find ways of becoming interlocutors.  They need to be able to gather facts, evaluate evidence, come up with ideas. But they also need to see how their ideas are in a larger conversation. They need to see that forming ideas is not the end of the process but a step along the way.

Those of us who teach need to confront this reality.  In her recent book, Planned Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, shows how digital technologies are changing the way we think about university scholarship.  In assessing the increasing demands of scholarly output placed on university professors, Fitzpatrick claims that “writing has been reduced from a process of discovery, exploration, and communication to a system for the assembly of more and more new products.”  Writing as product offers, in Fitzpatrick’s view, a disincentive to the dynamic nature of scholarly work.  She writes about how blogging, for example, can shift scholarly work toward a more public and more collaborative, international process.

Our digital lives are only just beginning to reshape our writing lives, and these changes are becoming more and more central to my work in the classroom. Last year, The New York Times published an article that wondered if the blog was replacing the term paper.  The conclusion was “not exactly” but the article pointed to a Stanford University study on the use of new media in writing education. “The students love writing for an audience, engaging with it,” the article noted in summarizing the study. “They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.”

Shifting perspective from grade to audience, from argument to interlocution and inquiry allows for new approaches to writing so crucial in our digital age. In many respects, it allows college students to invent the university in a whole new way.  While I can get nostalgic for English Composition, much of it now sadly feels as old as that electric typewriter.